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Every year, as temperatures approach their July peak, our
greener friends trot out global warming horrors and even more
horrible policies—witness President Obama’s recently
proposed diktats. But this year it’s different, as some
conservatives are pushing a oxymoronic “revenue
neutral” carbon tax.

You’d think people in D.C. might learn from others. Just
last month, precisely such a tax took down Australia’s Prime
Minister, Julia Gillard. She had succeeded Kevin Rudd, who was
bounced out of office for his support of a cap-and-trade scheme.
Rudd is now temporarily back, likely to be replaced when his Labour
party pays the ultimate price for Gillard’s tax in
September’s general election.

In Washington, bad ideas
are never in short supply.

Washington’s version of political suicide is the
brainchild of former Congressman Bob Inglis (R-SC), who lost his
primary by a 70-29 margin when he got global warming religion. He
now heads the “Energy and Enterprise Initiative” at R
Street Partners, a relatively new Washington think tank which split
off from Chicago’s libertarian/conservative Heartland
Institute over their aggressive stance on climate change.

Inglis’ theory—you can’t make this kind of
stuff up—is that his tax is going to be magically adopted by
Congress in some type of grand deal during President Obama’s
last year. Ask yourself: when was the last time the opposition
party made big deals with a lame duck Administration?

Every polemic I have seen on the carbon tax—including
Inglis’—particularly and specifically ignores recent
global warming science in complete contravention of a mountain of
evidence now accruing that global warming was dramatically over
forecast by scientists who had every incentive to do just that.
Furthermore, with regard to “revenue neutrality,’ the
notion that gazillions of dollars will float through Washington
“unmolested” (h/t to Heritage’s David Kreutzer
for that zinger) is as foolhardy as ignoring what is happening in
climate science.

Ignoring the science means disregarding 14 separate experiments
published in the scientific literature in the last two years, all
showing that way too much global warming was forecast. The fact
that there isn’t any temperature trend whatsoever in the last
16 years is forcing scientists to confront the reality that the
carbon taxers are choosing to evade.

The failure of the forecasts of dramatic warming is systematic.
A presentation in late June at the American Geophysical
Union’s Washington meeting on climate science and policy,
titled “Policy Implications of Climate Models on the Verge of
Failure,” demonstrated that, using the normative rules of
science, the forecasts presuming big warming must now be
abandoned.

One can use the EPA’s own model (curiously, acronymed
MAGICC) to assess the effects on global temperature of emissions
reductions that would be caused by a carbon tax. Assuming
outrageously high taxes that would reduce them by 83% (giving
Americans the per-capita emissions of 1867), the amount of warming
that would be prevented is too small to measure on the 50-year time
scale. Anything less does even less.

Irrationalities like conservatives supporting something that
cannot happen (a revenue-neutral energy tax) don’t arise in a
vacuum, which prompts some speculation as to who is supplying the
massive amount of money needed to propagandize something that seems
so absurd.

A recent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis,
“Effects of a Carbon Tax on the Economy and the
Environment” may include a clue. The report is pretty much
boilerplate except for where it departs into a specific section on
the implementation of the tax on coal producers:

“…analysts suggest that because the bulk of coal is
used to generate electricity, emissions resulting from coal could
be covered by taxing electricity generators on the basis of their
actual emissions”.

Whose analysts?

Taxing coal at the point of electricity generation will be a
decreasing expense to the industry (since EPA has pretty much
outlawed any new coal-fired power plants), more than made up for by
the bonanza of tax-free coal “leaking” from the
highly-regulated U.S. to ports around the world.

Maybe this explains the sudden emergence of a bizarre carbon tax
based on a completely irrational set of assumptions being
aggressively pushed by an obscure think tank and a former
congressman.

Or maybe it doesn’t. In Washington, bad ideas are never in short
supply.